Hoofing self-publishing's 'known unknowns': A #FutureChat recap

Image – iStockphoto: Dave Amsler

‘The author services crowd is loving these big numbers!’

Image – iStockphoto: Don Van Staden

That was author Abby Quillen during our #FutureChat of Friday (12th June). And she’s right. The blind man on the team who’s in the author services biz is sure to be happy with the size of whatever chunk he encounters. Everybody agrees that self-publishing is big. Very big.

But, of course, these big numbers are all guesswork, some educated, some not so much. We’ve spent almost a week at The FutureBook focused on what #FutureChat-er Tim Lewis reminded us might be called self-publishing’s “known unknowns,” Secy. Rumsfeld. With sales numbers unreported by leading retailers and much independent content produced without the ISBN that analysis services like Nielsen use to “see” and quantify the market, answering my Bookseller colleague Philip Jones’ question — how big is the market for self-published titles? — is, at least in part, conjecture.

Tomorrow, Tuesday (16th June), Jones will give us a look at what survey respondents are saying.

Another platform heard from

On the way into our review of #FutureChat, I’d like to give you this input from Ingram Content’s public relations folks, courtesy ofIngramSpark’sRobin Cutler. As you may know, IngramSpark is a platform that charges a fee (£29 or $49US, $53AUS or €36) for which it will set up your title for both ebook and print delivery, offering a wide range of production — including hardback — and distribution directly into bookstore channels in what the company says is 87 percent of the world’s nations, a purported 39,000 booksellers, libraries, and online retail settings. Physical-store access is one of Ingram’s strongest plays for indie business because Amazon CreateSpace products aren’t welcome in many brick-and-mortar retail emporia.

Here’s what Ingram’s offices had to say to our three questions.

Question: What is your estimate for how big the US market for self-published books is (value and volume)?

Ingram Content’s PR team: We know that the US market for self-published titles is big and it’s healthy. The most recent numbers available show that there were more than 450,000 new self-published titles in 2013. This was an increase of 17 percent over 2012 and 437 percent over 2008. Already this year, through the end of May, we have added thousands of self-published titles through our IngramSpark program, as well as from our author services partners into their Lightning Source accounts.

Question: What in your view is the main hindrance to working out the market size, and how would you suggest resolving that?

Ingram Content’s PR team: We only know about titles that are placed in the Ingram catalog either directly or indirectly through our publishing partners. ISBNs are another way to track but outside of the US this is problematic. Also on the E-side there is content being distributed directly into channels like Kindle and Smashwords without identifiers so that content is being universally counted at all…To get a full picture, you would need all channels to report out.

Selected tweets from 12th June’s #FutureChat

As you might expect, it was less a session of folks calling out their favorite guesses for how many self-published books are out there, and more a round of comments on many of the issues connected to the task of trying to sort what’s out there. Our thanks to all who joined us. The group included Howey and, briefly, John Milton series author Mark Dawson.

Join us Friday for #FutureChat meditation on what Robinson sweetly calls “pressures” in marketing.